Book review – Clair Wills – “Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain” plus a new @ShinyNewBooks review out now #NonfictionNovember

A review of what I consider an absolutely vital book to read if you live in the UK and care about the history and make-up of your local community, and a quick note of a Shiny review of a book I recently reviewed on here – Bernadine Evaristo’s “Girl, Woman, Other” – on Shiny here in slightly more detail than in my review on here, and also featuring in my next Non-Fiction November post.

Clair Wills – “Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain”

(22 May 2018, Foyles)

An excellent, powerful, readable book which studies the first wave of post-war immigration to the UK, so the Windrush generation, but also European displaced persons, Irish immigrants, returning soldiers and reunited families, and interrogates their own words, finding these in fiction, interviews, letters to the paper, broadcasts, songs and even an epic poem at all, to give their experience of “us” (I say this from a position of being 63/64 Southern English and 1/64 Spanish) rather than our experience of “them”. It goes behind the headlines and legal proceedings to paint a varied and fascinating picture of how Britain was seen and adapted to (or not) by the people who came here looking for some kind of a better life.

Wills comes from a Irish family in which her parents emigrated to the UK, and this gives her legitimacy to write about these lives and other new lives in Britain, a new kind of history where she traces, after the introduction, quite movingly highlighting the different kinds of journeys people made to get to Britain, themes of the perceived characteristics of the immigrants – sometimes encapsulating all of them, sometimes specific to a particular group – and looks across the period at that aspect and how it changes. It also somehow traces these lives and writings basically chronologically over the period, from those first bachelors to family members and women’s new spending powers, set against the backdrop of how changes in legislation and politics affected these groups of people and their interaction with more indigenous folk (though of course hardly any of us in the UK are truly indigenous if you trace us back far enough).

Wills is very good and thoughtful on the wider themes and psychologies as well as the nitty-gritty of everyday life, and both aspects are fascinating. She talks of the temporal and geographical limbo people fall into when they move somewhere they think temporarily, intending to return home, then trapped by circumstance or even finding themselves not at home in either the old country or the mother country.

The racism and fear, with touches of anger at perceived welfare tourism, not calmed by rather patronising leaflets trying to explain we all have the same motivations and aspirations, is horribly and depressingly familiar and made me think that no one has really changed and society never will (however, there were people who welcomed their new neighbours then, much as there are people like me who value our diversity now, and we probably need to cling to that).

There are some amazing and surprising statistics in the book. Did you know that half of the passengers on the Windrush had been posted in the UK during the Second World War but then returned home, only to come back to seek a better post-war life? Or that in the 1950s, almost a sixth of the entire population of the Republic of Ireland was in the UK, and a far higher proportion of the working population?

Stories of her own family are skilfully woven in, giving another layer to the story, as we meet people from broadcasters to bachelors, lovers to brothers, people who stayed in their own community, worked in their own language and wrote in their own language to activists who took the US as an example and fought for change in the wider community. Some immigrants were less visible and faded from view, and this is most true perhaps of the European displaced persons, tested for infestations and humiliated, but assimilating while trying to hold on to their own cultures. Many voices are featured and differences as well as similarities brought up and examined.

A really vital book to read, but readable as well as informative, I hasten to add, in case I’ve made it look a bit dry!

Yes indeed, it’s been out a couple of years (I must work out when I moved from reading books a month or so after I acquired them to having a year or more’s lag) but I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere at all.